SAP and Esri Help Customers Map Their Way to a Better Bottom Line

July 15, 2014
| SAP - Analytics

Partnership Helps Businesses Break Down of Silos Between Geographic Information System and Business Data to Help Uncover New Insights and Accelerate Decision-Making

SAN DIEGO - SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced the general availability of new innovations, features and functionalities across the SAP HANA® platform, analytics, mobile and business applications that are intended to strengthen and simplify integration with Esri’s industry-leading geospatial services and content. The partnership brings high-performance spatial analytics, self-service mapping and collaboration to geographic information system (GIS) and business users to allow them to leverage real-time location intelligence in both their Esri and SAP environments. The announcement was made at the Esri User Conference, being held July 14–18 in San Diego.

SAP and Esri each support a large number of customers in asset-intensive industries. The partnership between SAP and Esri facilitates the breakdown of information silos and spatially enables the enterprise and simplifies the unlocking of shared data in SAP business applications and Esri GIS systems, equipping business users with a more complete picture to help make more informed and efficient decisions.

“SAP and Esri are helping users improve business efficiency and confidently anticipate what comes next in order to guide better, more profitable, forward-looking decision-making,” said Steve Lucas, president, Platform Solutions, SAP. “By integrating ESRI’s industry leading GIS with SAP HANA, the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform and SAP Mobile Platform as well as geospatial analytics within SAP Lumira, we are enriching business data with geographical context and presenting it in real time — bringing a whole new level of insight to customers.”

“Esri ArcGIS is one of the leading platforms for organizations implementing a location analytics strategy through the geo-enablement of their enterprise business systems,” said Jack Dangermond, CEO, Esri. “By working with SAP to integrate ArcGIS across SAP HANA, analytic solutions, business and mobile applications, we ensure that customers can easily leverage Esri within their SAP landscapes.”

Esri ArcGIS Native Processing in SAP HANA
Last year, SAP added native high-performance processing of spatial data to the SAP HANA platform. Now, SAP and Esri have delivered new functionality to help business users, GIS analysts and developers be more productive. Business users can run complex spatial queries on massive volumes of data in real-time using SAP HANA via Esri Query Layers. This functionality works to accelerate location analytics because Esri ArcGIS executes queries natively on SAP HANA closer to where the data resides. GIS analysts now have more direct access to business data, which they can enrich with geospatial context without having to move data between GIS and operational systems. The Esri mapping platform also enables self-service mapping, analysis and collaboration across the entire scope of an organization. Additionally, developers can quickly create high-performance spatial applications that consume ArcGIS Online geo-content and mapping services using ArcGIS for Developers and the developer edition of SAP HANA, available on SAP HANA Marketplace.

“We have built a custom application on SAP HANA that helps us identify high-risk gas pipes in close proximity to residential buildings. In the past, this analysis took three and a half hours using our legacy database,” said Pieter Den Hamer, Big Data BI Strategy Manager, Alliander. “Now with spatial processing in SAP HANA, we can answer the same question in two to three seconds, allowing us to perform ad hoc asset management, reduce potential outages and avoid catastrophic failures. We can literally say we are saving lives with SAP HANA.”

Integration of Geospatial Analytics With SAP Lumira® Software and SAP® BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence Suite
Today’s announcement also includes an extension of the SAP and Esri partnership to include geospatial analytics from ArcGIS Online within SAP Lumira, the SAP solution for agile visualization. This innovation, available now, will help customers leverage existing Esri ArcGIS server and online Esri maps inside business intelligence tools from SAP, enabling users to visualize data on a map to help see new patterns and trends.
Additional options for integration between SAP BusinessObjects BI and Esri geospatial services include: Galigeo BI for Location Analytics for SAP® BusinessObjects™ Web Intelligence® software, Integeo Map Intelligence for SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, Centigon CMaps Analytics and Esri Maps for SAP BusinessObjects BI.

SAP Brings Geographical Content to SAP Business Suite Applications to Link GIS Information to Business Data
With the GEO.e framework delivered by SAP Consulting, spatial data is embedded into business processes, helping to enable users to visualize business data about land parcels, buildings, assets or work orders on maps from within an SAP application. Geo-enabled business applications include the SAP Enterprise Asset Management solution, the SAP Linear Asset Management application, the SAP Real Estate Management application and the SAP Customer Relationship Management application, which help organizations in industries such as utilities, oil and gas, mining, transportation, public sector and agriculture to become more efficient.

“By working with SAP Consulting we were able to integrate financial, real estate and contract data from SAP applications with GIS data from our Esri ArcGIS system,” said Erik van Os, Project Planning and Control, Land Management, Province of Noord Brabant. “By geographically-enabling our business data using the GEO.e service from SAP, we have improved the efficiency of our business processes and reduced integration costs.”

ESRI ArcGIS Integration With SAP Mobile Platform for Location-Based Work Management
SAP added new integration with SAP Mobile Platform to extend geospatial data from ESRI ArcGIS systems to its mobile field employees as a part of SAP Work Manager mobile app. SAP Work Manager enables users to manipulate interactive maps and to obtain more detailed information on the geographic region in question. By tying into SAP Business Suite, mobile applications like SAP Work Manager help simplify user experiences by merging enterprise data such as work orders, notifications and equipment information with geospatial data in one single view, facilitating elimination of paper data entry and the hunt for data while in the field.

About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 253,500 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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